The ever-increasing availability of primary sources on the Internet, not to mention classics of the scholarly literature and other secondary sources, makes everyone suspect that printed readers and anthologies have become as anachronistic as the typewriter. If so, however, this particular cartographic reader must be the exception that proves the rule.
Matthew H. Edney, current editor in chief of the multivolume History of Cartography (University of Chicago Press, 1987 – forthcoming), provides an engaging foreword that explains how maps not only record historical locations, distributions, and movements but are intimately involved in the processes through which those spatial aspects of history emerge. Historians have increasingly appreciated that aspect of cartographic documents and have begun to integrate their analyses into historiographies largely based on textual documents.
The pages that follow Edney’s foreword collect together approximately a hundred historical maps, some well known and available on the Internet as high-resolution scans but...
